The "Paper-Less" Journalists…

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is dead at the age of 145, sick and in debt. This newspaper that was read every day by more than 100,000 people released its last issue yesterday. Its name appears on a never-ending list that is about to reach the cemetery for dead newspapers.

Symbolically, the newspaper is still alive since it offers a virtual, online version everyday.

However…

The editorial office that used to be the core of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was made up of 170 journalists, photographers and computer operators. Now, in this devastated editorial office, there are just 20 survivors doing all the reporting, writing, proofreading, and photo and video editing – twenty versatile and polymorph “paper-less” who have to communicate on a daily basis and venerate cross-platform flexibility. With such shrunken resources, how can it be possible to have quality news and the kind of substantial content equivalent to that our good old black capital letters printed on white paper used to provide us?

I recently had a conversation with some journalism students who asked me my opinion about the journalistic future. “What future?” I replied quite brutally. As I saw their distraught faces, I tried to moderate my angry-sounding words by explaining to them that things change so rapidly and so radically these days that neither I nor anyone else can foresee what the future of journalism will be. I could have also said that anyone pretending to have a firm reply to this questioning is nothing, but a shirker. Jacques Godbout and Florian Sauvageau gave me the beginnings of a reply thanks to their documentary “Derrière la toile: le quatrième pouvoir” (Behind The Web: The Fourth Power), which was shown for the first time yesterday evening at the UQAM (Université du Québec A Montréal) and will be aired during the forthcoming season on Radio-Canada.

Thirty years after the documentary “Derrière l’image” (Behind The Picture), which had a purpose to show the impact that television had on the evolution of journalism, Godbout and Sauvageau wanted this time to explore the influence of the Internet on today’s newswires.

Before heading to New York, they visited Quebec’s “media garden” and attempted to penetrate Pierre Karl Péladeau’s thoughts as well as those of my colleagues Sophie Cousineau and Patrick Lagacé. The latter two are actually very happy that they chose to be involved in the “blog world” despite some negative people who sometimes reign supreme in the blogosphere and ruin the course of the debates and exchanges. Once more in Quebec, a specialist in communication, and moreover a true believer in the religion of television, explains in front of a camera that in the good ol’ times, an article that was published in a newspaper meant the end of a discussion, whereas text on the web nowadays means the beginning of a discussion. All right. What else?

Not much, actually. The documentary ends where it should have begun, probably because it was filmed too early, before disaster appeared: the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and many other dailies that were protected by the law of bankruptcy. Even the New York Times now has to make a pact with the devil (portrayed by the Mexican millionaire Carlos Sim).

If Godbout and Sauvageau had waited for another year, they could have collected some pieces of information about the “paper-less” cities, especially those editorial offices with no labor forces any more, where you can only feel a cybernetic silence. Just an extra little year and they would have noticed that the Web and its limited editorial spaces is not the root of the problem. Journalists can write 1,000 or a million words without having to cut or compress anything. The true problem comes from this erosion as well as an eventual disappearance of the editorial offices where journalists get paid to find the news, bring it back and share it.

Newspapers that are manufactured with paper are slowly dying, this is sad, but that won’t kill journalism. Journalism and paper-less are threatened by a real danger, a small army of journalists in which each of them has five tasks to do instead of just one, just like the survivors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

This is found in the best possible scenario. In the worst one, within six months or a year, the 20 survivors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will be made redundant and thanked for all their kind services, and they will also be replaced by two Indian subcontracting firms whose employees will get paid for a song.

In contemplation of this disastrous scenario, I would suggest that Godbout and Sauvageau prepare a sequel to their documentary. I hope that when this documentary is over, there will still be newspapers to talk about it and a public TV network to broadcast it.

NATASHA’s VIRTUAL DEATH – At 12:38 yesterday, Time Out New York, a New York based cultural site, killed actress Natasha Richardson. Literally. Under her photo, the letters RIP followed by her birth and death years didn’t allow any doubt to linger. However, one hour later, Natasha was alive again, although her brain was clinically dead. In the late afternoon, the vultures’ impatience to feed upon a woman’s remains had reached an uncouth and conflicting peak. According to some sites, she was just hurt, according to some others, she was in a critical state. One day, one will have to follow the evolution of a story on the (cob)web with a camera and measure the degree of inhumanity that can take hold of the paper-less every time they consider the news not as an instrument of freedom, but as an ordinary and violent oversized car race.